Every frame in our catalogue is the revival of a pattern from a European optical house that no longer makes it. Below are the houses we currently work with — found at fairs, in estate sales, in the back rooms of opticians whose grandfathers ran the workshop.
A Cadore workshop, started by Egisto Tartaglia in 1879, that made small round acetate frames for Italian opticians until the founder’s son retired in 1992. Their 1968 catalogue described their best-selling pattern — a 48mm round with a saddle bridge and a five-barrel hinge — as the <em>“studente”</em>. We bought the patterns from Egisto’s granddaughter and revived them as the Aldo.
A Florentine atelier that made frames almost exclusively for women between 1955 and 1973. The Ines pattern — a soft cat-eye, upswept but only just — was described in its catalogue as <em>“per la donna che legge, non per quella che è letta”</em> (“for the woman who reads, not the woman who is read”). The atelier closed when its founder, Ines Pellegrini, was killed in the 1973 Florence flood; her daughter sold us the patterns at a fair in Bologna in 2023.
Crispi made frames for Milanese opticians for nearly thirty years. Their 1958 catalogue called the panto pattern the <em>professori</em> — issued to schoolteachers via a Lombardy regional supply contract that paid for half the run. We revived two patterns: the panto itself (the Crispi) and a quieter oval from earlier in the catalogue (the Vega). Both came from the same paper folder, marked "Cliente: Provincia di Milano".
A small workshop in the provincial capital of Belluno, twenty kilometres from us, run by the Bardi family from 1962 until they sold the trademark to a wholesaler in 1979. We bought the original 1971 pattern from Pietro Bardi the younger, who is now eighty-three and lives a kilometre from our workshop.
Hardy supplied frames to the French civil service — particularly the postal and customs services — for nine years before the contract was lost to a larger competitor. The 1962 pattern is severe but unexpectedly comfortable, with a 4° pantoscopic tilt that sits more naturally than it should. Issued in Black, Burgundy, and Navy.
More house histories — Falco, Galen & Sons, Junot et Cie, Lunetterie du Marais, Otera Madrid — are coming. We write them as we find the family or the catalogue, not the other way around.